Fantasy fiction always revolves around magic or some other kind of supernatural force.

Thinking back to how I defined science fiction, you could say that magic or the supernatural is the “disruptive technology” of the fantasy genre. This power can manifest itself in certain objects (the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings), places (the Overlook hotel in The Shining) or people (Harry Potter), or it may permeate the entire universe, accessible to everyone or, more often, to a chosen few who have either been born with the ability to tap into it or else devoted their lives to learning how master it (The Wheel of Time series).

Like the technology in sci-fi stories, the entire world is shaped by the presence of this magical power and those who control it. However, unlike sci-fi stories, in fantasy worlds, the laws of physics are given pretty short shrift with no explanation offered or required.

Not surprisingly, the conflict in fantasy stories revolves around gaining control of or destroying the supernatural force at the heart of the story before it falls into the wrong hands—or before the force, itself, gains control of the world. This battle can take many forms, such as a quest to capture or destroy a magical object, to open or close a doorway between two worlds, an exorcism or a battle between two masters of magic. As with sci-fi, the denizens of the fantasy world often pay a horrible price before the dark powers are defeated and order restored.

Like their sci-fi cousins, fantasy stories can also serve as a powerful form of social commentary. However, rather than focus on our ambivalence toward technology, they can serve as metaphors to explore all sorts of other issues, such as the environment, racism, war and the very nature of reality.

Can the two ever be combined?

Yes, but proceed cautiously.

As I noted previously, Star Wars is a great example of how sci-fi and fantasy can be brought together in an innovative and engaging way. But merging the two genres in this fashion is always a risky venture. And not even George Lucas manages to evade the thorny issues involved.

The problem with combining sci-fi and fantasy is that while the power of sci-fi is explanation—a revelation of how the technology at the core of the story actually works—what makes fantasy so appealing is mystery.

Going back to Star Wars, we don’t want a scientific explanation of how the Force works, which is what George Lucas attempted to give us in his latter three films. We just want to know whether Luke will be able to master the force in time to defeat Darth Vader and the Emperor. Once the characters start talking about midi-chlorians, all of the mystery that made the Force (and the Star Wars universe) so appealing melts away.

As you can see, distinguishing between sci-fi and fantasy is far more than a mere intellectual exercise. A rare individual may be able to combine the two, but chances are you are not that person! Instead, it’s much wiser to choose one genre or the other and then remain true to its conventions throughout. That doesn’t mean you can’t subvert those conventions and/or employ them in new and innovative ways. But each genre has evolved in a certain direction for a reason. So rather than try to force a genre to perform a task it was never designed to carry out, design your story in such a way that it will exploit your chosen genre’s strengths rather than reveal its weaknesses.

Fantasy fiction always revolves around magic or some other kind of supernatural force.

When discussing various types of fiction, it’s common for people to lump sci-fi and fantasy together, as if they were virtually the same genre.

To be fair, on a general level, this comparison certainly holds true. For example, both sci-fi and fantasy stories involve imaginary worlds, strange creatures and forces beyond those which we experience in the here and now. For this reason, the two genres also tend to appeal to the same sorts of readers, those who yearn for an escape from the everyday. But beyond these broad similarities, sci-fi and fantasy bear some key distinctions that most people tend to overlook or ignore.

You may think the need to distinguish between sci-fi and fantasy a minor point, yet another example of the perpetual hair-splitting that typifies the world of geekdom. But when it comes to writing in either of these genres, such distinctions are all-important.

If you’ve struggled to differentiate between the two genres, I’d like to offer two general rules to guide your thinking in this area.

1. Science fiction always revolves around the introduction of a disruptive technology.

Whether it’s time travel (Looper), artificial intelligence (2001: A Space Odyssey), the ability to predict crimes before they happen (Minority Report), artificial humans (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), terra-forming (Dune) or cloning (Brave New World), each sci-fi story revolves around a disruptive technology that completely reorders the world in its image.

Typically, when the technology is first introduced, it is viewed as good or at the worst, benign. But then something goes wrong, and the very people who created the technology or who benefited from it are now threatened by it, with the fate of the entire world potentially hanging in the balance. A struggle ensues to regain control over the technology, to destroy it or to prevent it from falling into evil hands. In the end, order is usually restored, but at a tremendous price and with lingering doubts about whether or not human “progress” is really all it’s cracked up to be.

This story pattern is similar whether the threat unleashed takes the form of a device or some sort of monster (Godzilla, Frankenstein) or alien (The Thing, Alien). In the latter case, it’s the monster rather than a device that must be defeated or destroyed. But in the end, the technology that gave rise to it often targeted for destruction as well. (Think of the mob descending upon Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.)

Science fiction stories may bend the laws of physics, but true or “hard” science fiction stories will never break them. Even if a sci-fi story appears to break one or more laws of physics, a plausible explanation will usually be offered to justify the apparent discrepancy. In this regard, although a story like Star Wars is often classified as science fiction, it is really more of a fantasy. The films certainly employ all sorts of technology, but the only truly disruptive power in the Star Wars universe is the Force, which is essentially a form of magic.

On a metaphorical level, sci-fi stories tend to reflect our ambivalence toward our own technological progress. Whether we’re talking nuclear weapons, surveillance technology, genetic modification of food, cloning or other forms of biotechnology, science fiction is a great way to explore the pros and cons of human curiosity and technological ability. While such stories tend to be pessimistic in tone, rather than an absolute rejection of technology, they are more often offered as cautionary tales.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down to edit a science fiction or fantasy manuscript, only to discover within the first few pages that the author hasn’t done his or her homework. What I mean by that is, the author has put little to no effort into working out the history, politics, economics, language or culture of the world in which the story takes place. As a result, the story feels shallow, derivative, superficial or more typically, all of the above.

In response, I tend to recommend two examples. For fantasy writers, I bring up The Lord of the Rings. For sci-fi writers, I cite Frank Herbert’s Dune series. In my mind—and the minds of millions of their fans—these works represent the benchmarks of their respective genres.

I suspect this is true, because both Dune and The Lord of the Rings arose through a similar creative process. In the first case, Frank Herbert was researching sand dune formation in Oregon and the Department of Agriculture’s attempts to stabilize the dunes through the use of poverty grasses when it occurred to him that such efforts would make an interesting foundation for a sci-fi novel. He spent the next five years researching ecology and concocting an entire universe based around this idea. The result is a rich, multi-layered world whose history extends back thousands of years. We only get to see the tip of the iceberg in the Dune novels, which are, themselves, quite substantial. But that’s what makes them so great, knowing there’s so much more Herbert could have told us—if only he’d had the time.

The Lord of the Rings owes its origin to Tolkien’s fascination with languages. Language building was Tolkien’s hobby—to the point where it often overshadowed his “more important” work as an Oxford professor. As everyone knows, languages don’t come out of nowhere. They evolve over time as a result of various historic events—war, trade, travel, etc. Realizing his languages couldn’t exist in a vacuum, Tolkien slowly developed the world out of which his languages arose, including thousands of years of history, different races, cultures, poetry, and so on. Even though The Lord of the Rings took Tolkien over 10 years to write, that represents just a fraction of the time it took him to build the world in which the tale of Frodo Baggins’s epic quest takes place. And the time period in which the story occurs represents only a sliver of time in the deep, rich history of Middle Earth.

Most writers (me included!) don’t relish the idea of taking five to ten years to build a world before we actually begin telling our story. Then again, most writers never achieve the stature or enduring appeal of Herbert or Tolkien.

So if you want to be amongst this select group, it’s simple: do what they did. It won’t be easy, and it certainly won’t guarantee you success. Remember: twenty publishers turned down Herbert’s Dune manuscript before Chilton—which normally published manuals for automobiles—finally decided to give it a chance. But it will definitely set you apart from the hundreds of writers who don’t do this kind of preparation.

And on a completely selfish note, it will certainly make my job a lot more fun when and if your manuscript ever makes it to my desk.

In my previous article, I introduced the idea of the character-driven vs. the plot-driven story, arguing that if the plot drives the story, that’s tantamount to the writer driving the story. And if the writer is driving the story, that means the characters aren’t. As a result, such stories feel flat, cold, and unconvincing.

As I noted, the first step toward avoiding this error is to realize that plot should always be subservient to character transformation. In other words, the events that unfold should always be a byproduct of character choices made under pressure. Characters should never a byproduct of story events.

The second step is to realize that character transformation always unfolds through a series of predictable stages. That’s because art imitates life. What we see on the page or on the screen is merely a reflection of how life actually happens. Once you have a better understanding of how this change process works—and how our natural resistance to change automatically builds tension and suspense—you’ll never write a shallow, plot-driven story again. In this article, we’ll take a look at the first stage of character transformation.

Stage 1: Disunity

Virtually every protagonist starts out with a form of “multiple personality disorder.” Like Neo in the Matrix, they are living two lives. One of them has a future, and one of the does not. The two lives a character is living can be described as his or her “inner self” and “outer self.” The question is, which is the true self? Or, more importantly, which self will prevail in the end? This is exactly the sort of question a story is designed to answer. If the false self prevails, we tend to call the story a tragedy. If the true self wins, we call the story a comedy (speaking in the classical sense of the word; it doesn’t mean the story is full of laughs).

More often than not, it’s the external self that is false. Think of it as a coping mechanism, a false identity that the character has adopted to avoid confronting his or her deepest fear. The problem is, at some point along the way he or she became confused. Rather than recognize the false self for what it is, a crutch, the character has come to accept the false self as his or her true identity. Something drastic must happen to shock them back into awareness. Otherwise everything the character values will be lost. A good story typically begins right before this terrible tragedy is about to occur.

One of my favorite examples from the movies is Indiana Jones. The filmmakers take great pains at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark to illustrate Indy’s dual life. In the first eleven-minute prologue, he’s a daring adventurer who will stop at nothing to reclaim precious artifacts. Why? “Because they belong in a museum!” According to Indy, he’s doing it for the public good. (A motivation his antagonist, Belloq, questions later on.) For the moment, though, Indy is iconic, seen first in silhouette as the man in the hat and the leather jacket. Even before we hear him speak, we see him use another aspect of his persona—his whip. Indy doesn’t exactly laugh at death, but he doesn’t shrink from it, either. The only weakness we see (apart from failing to learn to speak Hovitos) is his fear of snakes. Rather than indicate a deep character flaw, this is played for laughs.

However, in the very next scene, Indy is transformed into a bumbling, nerdy professor totally flummoxed by a female student’s affections. It’s interesting to note the connection between fear of snakes and fear of the female species, because at a key moment in the film, he will find himself essentially buried alive with his two greatest fears—snakes and women. I won’t go into the mythic symbolism of snakes and women here. (We’re all familiar with the Garden of Eden story.) But I don’t think it’s an accident.

In terms of this article, though, at this point, we are confronted with a key question: Who is the real Indy?

Indiana Jones isn’t unlike other “superhero” type characters, such as Batman. The question of identity is central to such characters, particularly in Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s treatment of the Dark Knight in their trilogy of films. Which is the mask: Batman or Bruce Wayne? No matter how you answer this question, for the story to proceed, ultimately, one of them must die.

Going back to Indy, I find it rather telling that when he accepts the call to go after the Ark of the Covenant, he packs up virtually everything we have come to identify with the adventurous side of his character—his jacket, his whip and his gun—into a suitcase. Whether the filmmakers meant to say it or not, the subtext here is screaming that this side of Indy is literally baggage. It’s not his true self. It’s a persona he’s adopted to compensate for some sort of deep-seated fear. It’s something he carries with him wherever he goes. What is his greatest fear? Inadequacy. He’s constantly overcompensating for feelings of inferiority. How do we know this? Because we’ve all seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which he works out his father issues.

A further confirmation that the adventurer side of Indy is false occurs during the climax of the film. We find Indy completely helpless and tied to a post. And guess what? No hat, no jacket, no whip and no gun. In fact, he’s wearing the tattered remnants of the enemy—a Nazi uniform—yet another false self he adopted and then discarded in his quest. And now he must go face-to-face with God. The question is, will he survive?

In case you haven’t seen the film (and I can’t believe you haven’t!) I won’t ruin the ending for you. Suffice to say, though, that despite all of the high adventure in this film (my favorite of all time), when it comes right down to it, Raiders of the Lost Ark is merely about the transformation of Indiana Jones: from skeptic to believer, from immutable to vulnerable, from idealist to realist.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is only stage one of the journey: disunity. To see a character like Indiana Jones or Neo complete the journey of transformation, they need to encounter a disruption, a make-or-break moment where he or she must choose between clinging to the false identity—or certain death. I call this stage “Disruption.” We’ll look at it in my next article.

One of the most common problems with the fantasy and science fiction manuscripts I read is that they are plot-driven rather than character-driven. What I mean is, the author appears to have come up with an interesting high concept, plotted out a series of events and then inserted a cast of characters to play them out. While this might seem like a logical way to write a science fiction or fantasy story, I would argue that this approach is exactly the opposite of how things should happen.

The problem with the plot-driven model is that everything is external and, therefore, shallow. Instead of feeling like real people who are allowed to learn and change and grow, characters are reduced to mere “plot points” brought on stage to serve the needs of the author rather than the story itself. As a result, the characters feel flat, and the story is cold and unconvincing.

The first step toward avoiding this error is to realize that plot should always be subservient to character transformation. In other words, in a good story, the events that unfold will always be a byproduct of character choices made under pressure. Characters are never a byproduct of story events.

Think of the movie The Matrix, for example. The protagonist, Neo, is in the driver’s seat throughout the film. At first, it’s his choice to seek the truth about the Matrix that leads him to be discovered by Morpheus, Trinity and their crew. His refusal to trust Morpheus at first gets him into all sorts of trouble. And then his decision to take the red pill changes everything. Once he’s unplugged from the Matrix, he chooses to believe that he really might be “the one” who can save the rest of humanity from the machines who oppress them. As Neo grows in power, the machines respond to this new threat by increasing their efforts to wipe out the human rebels, which results in the capture of Morpheus. Rather than flee, Neo chooses to re-enter the Matrix and rescue Morpheus, which leads to him overcoming the machines and finally realizing his true potential as “the one.”

As you can see, at every stage in the film, Neo’s choices rather than external events drive the story. Of course, at times Neo reacts to external events, such as the capture of Morpheus. But Morpheus was only captured as a result of Neo’s choice to pursue his destiny, so Neo inadvertently engineered even this situation (which is one of reasons, he goes back in to save Morpheus—he feels guilty.)

The second step toward avoiding the error of the plot-driven story is to realize that character transformation always unfolds through a predictable series of stages. Once you have a better understanding of how this change process works—and how our natural resistance to change automatically builds tension and suspense—you’ll never write a plot-driven story again. We’ll take a look at that change process in my next article.